7.07.2011

In yesterday's Bits, I linked up Brooklyn artist Kyle McDonald's project People Staring at Computers, in which he created an app that took snapshots, one every minute, of people shopping for computers at Apple stores in New York, and uploaded them to his site. His project description says the project is "exhibited on site with a remotely triggered app that displayed the photos full screen on every available computer."

On three days in June, McDonald’s program documented people staring at computers in Apple stores. Since the stores wiped their computers every night, he had to go back in and reinstall the program each day he took photos. He uploaded a collection of the photos to a Tumblr blog, and last Sunday he set up “an exhibition” at the Apple stores. During the unauthorized event at the Apple stores on West 14th Street and in Soho, when people looked at an Apple store machine, they saw a picture of themselves. Then they saw photos of other people staring at computers. Amazingly, nobody made a fuss.

[...]

Over the course of the project, McDonald set up roughly 100 Apple store computers to call his servers every minute. That’s a lot of network traffic, and he learned that Apple monitors traffic in its stores when he received a photo from a Cupertino computer of what appeared to be an Apple technician. The technician had apparently traced the traffic to the site McDonald used to upload the program to Apple Store computers — and installed it himself.

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

This led me to wonder what a reasonable right to privacy is, while in public, and I found the following site, photorights.org, where they pretty much break it down: http://photorights.org/faq/is-it-legal-to-take-photos-of-people-without-asking

The very first sentences sum it up quite well: "In public places where there is no right to privacy, yes you can. The same applies in private places where you have the permission of the landowner or the landowner has stated no restrictions on photography."

1) Is an Apple store a public or a private place?2) The photographer claims he got permission from the guard - who is likely NOT the landowner.

Regardless, I find the whole thing intensely creepy and a violation - perhaps not legally, but certainly ethically.

I think there are some interesting aspects to the work, but I also agree that there are good questions about privacy while in public and, more importantly, transmission of surreptitiously gotten images.

Not as creepy as this, though: Woman hides in the men's urinal, takes photo of guy peeing, then has her attorney argue she was in a "public" place.

An Apple store is a PRIVATE place. It is the very definition of private property, being owned or leased by Apple, which as we all know is a corporation, not a branch of the government.

And I doubt he got permission of the guard, as it is highly likely the guard had no idea what he was saying and was giving him permission to play with the computers.

Even if he did get permission of the guard, the guard is unlikely to be an Apple employee anyway. Not getting the permission of the manager of the store, whom we all know would have said "no", proves his intent to violate people's privacy.

I think government raids on people's computers are asinine, but this guy owes compensation to his victims.

Note his victims are the people whose pictures he took and the Apple company.... not "society".